At this point in the opera, the shepherd is asked to watch the sea for a ship that would rescue the lifeless Tristan. The former then delivers the line quoted hereand departs, playing his reed-pipe. Immediately, Tristan awakens. Tristan’s awakening offers us a parallel to the one Odysseus has and which is possibly alluded to in the previous lines, depicting, as the poem often dies, the same ritual across different zones of time and space.

The line is spoken by the SHEPHERD character, and like the previous quotation, comes at the beginning of an act; the third one. It’s preceded by some lines that recall some of the poem’s central concerns: